Dirt Cheap

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Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job
market,
By Elisabeth Wynhausen,
Pan Macmillan, $30

I came to Dirt Cheap, Elisabeth Wynhausen's account of
a year working for minimum wages, fully expecting to hate it.

An Australian knock-off of Barbara Ehrenreich's best-selling
Nickle and Dimed seemed eminently cringe-worthy - a book
about McJobs had itself been franchised. And, despite Ehrenreich's
critical success, the presumption of a journalist speaking for the
poor after 12 months of slumming rather stuck in the craw.

Yet Wynhausen's powerful, impassioned prose won me over almost
immediately. Though she acknowledges the precedent of Nickle
and Dimed, she establishes her own voice from the first page:
funny and tough, humane, eloquent and angry.

Her diary of floor sweeping and pot scrubbing doesn't speak for
the underclass as much as explain why, with one in eight
Australians living in poverty, the poor remain so entirely
voiceless.

We follow Wynhausen as she abandons her comfort zone at The
Australian to clean offices, serve sandwiches in a snobby
private club ("they spoke in accents as brittle as glass") and pack
eggs at a poultry factory.

She works, ineptly, a cash register at a department store and
lands, entirely without references, a job in a nursing home "where
I stumbled across a commode that hadn't been emptied, gagged and
rushed to gulp some air in the corridor. I stood there a minute to
remind myself that I would be spending a few days doing what
thousands of underpaid workers do every working day".

Her sketches of her workmates and the ways they respond to their
situation provide the warm heart of her narrative. Svetlana works
in a hotel, cowering from the employer's surveillance camera - and
treasures the job that gets her away from a dysfunctional marriage.
Helen, in the hostel, keeps a busy kitchen running, covers for
Wynhausen's blunders and finds time to talk with the abandoned and
miserable residents. "But she made such modest claims for herself,
it hadn't occurred to her that she should get more, even if getting
more was the defining spirit of the age."

From dead end job to dead end job, Wynhausen documents the
inadequacy of the institutions supposed to protect low-wage
workers. Individual contracts, say the ideologues, are a matter of
personal choice but when she answers an ad for a hotel job, the
penalty-rate-free contract arrives "as if my signature on the piece
of paper was a mere formality".

The Occupational Health and Safety regulations that look good on
paper prove impossible in practice. "I could just imagine what (my
supervisor) would say if I followed the order in the manual and
advised her that the slippery floor around the tray wash machine
was a workplace hazard."

Many of her positions come to an abrupt end when she can no
longer bite her tongue in response to bullying supervisors or
institutional stupidity. But pride is a trait the truly poor cannot
afford.

Devoid of any agency through which to control their existence,
they internalise their own marginality and when Wynhausen reveals
her real identity, her co-workers "have trouble believing that
anyone would bother to write - let alone read - a book about their
working lives".

It's no wonder. Last century, Jack London and George Orwell
journeyed into the urban slums and denounced poverty as a social
rather than individual problem. Such thinking has long since
evaporated: as Wynhausen notes, in a deregulated, neo-liberal world
"fairness and equity now barely get a hearing". When Paris Hilton
and Nicole Richie encounter the contemporary people of the abyss,
they respond with a contemptuous: "Eeewhhh!"

In the future, perhaps, dishwashers, waitresses and other
conscripts from the invisible army of the poor will pen their own
stories. Until then, read Dirt Cheap. Tender, funny and righteously
angry, it provides a badly needed window on to the aching and
forgotten lives upon which our society rests.